Clarus: the Apple Dogcow

Trollaxor wrote on his blog a very different origin for Clarus, Susan Kare was not envolved and the story is definitivly not for children :

"It's a well known fact that Apple, since its inception, has been a haven for free thinkers and progressive thought, heralded by none other than famous acid-tripping Steve Jobs and his hippie buddies from California. It was on one of the famous beach parties, notorious for getting out of hand, that Clarus was born.

It was a balmy night in August 1984 that Jobs held yet another beach party, this one with a special theme: who could come up with a mascot for the Mac development team? Of course, the Apple II team was there and tensions, as always, were high. That didn't deter the Mac team from bringing their pet, Clara, a cow they'd been raising on the Apple campus since birth.

Clara was birthed by the Mac team when they'd held a party on the Apple campus and had hired a bull-breeder as entertainment. All night long, the bull-breeder studded Hercules, his prize bull, with an assortment of cows. As the festivities continued throughout the night, a strange moaning was coming from one of the trailers.

One of the cows he'd brought with him was, unbeknownst to the bull-breeder, pregnant! The Mac development team, being the resourceful hackers they were, helped give birth to the calf, the mother losing its life in the process. The bull-breeder was so taken by the Mac dev team's efforts he let them keep the calf, which they named Clara.

Now, at the August 1984 beach party, the Mac team lobbied for Jobs to adopt Clara as the development mascot of the Macintosh. The Apple II team, spurned and bitter because of dwindling sales and neglect at the hand of Jobs, had brought their own mascot — Cletus, a vicious Rotweiler they'd bought from a ruddy-faced street man in the ghetto of Cupertino for $25.

Cletus was a frothing, flea-and-mange ridden terror that barked at the least provocation. The Apple II team fed it raw goat meat and corrupted 5.25" floppies to make it mean. They also kicked it and made sure its chain was too tight at all times. Here at the party was their chance for revenge at Jobs and his favorite Mac development team.

As the night wore on, both the Apple II and Mac teams got drunker and drunker before Jobs called for a company vote on the mascot. What met the company's faces was something none of them could have imagined, however.

In their drunken, stoned stupor, the embittered Apple II team had snuck into Clara's trailer and cut the rear end of off Clara. Drugging her with ether to staunch her cries, they had used an electric chainsaw, cut her back legs and rectum cleanly off, and taken them to the bonfire to cook and eat. They'd even fed some to the drunk Mac dev team.

After they'd done this, they forced Cletus into the gaping hole in Clara's rear end. Gnawing away at his first real meal in months, Cletus lodged himself in Clara's colon and couldn't break free. So when the Mac dev team opened Clara's trailer and led their pet down the ramp, they were met with a bloody, gut-strewn mess and a weird, unnatural animal call of moof!

The entire company was sickened by this and soon the sand was dotted with puddles of vomit. Cries of moof, moof! filled the air as the joined dogcow trundled terribly along the beach, seizuring with each step, vomiting an icky mass of hair and blood, with a glazed look in its cow eyes. With a final shudder, the dogcow fell and died, and the partygoers surrounded the putrid mess of bovine/canine flesh.

Of course, it didn't take long for the Mac dev team to discover the Apple II team's treachery and a bloody brawl ensued over the death of Clara. By the end of the night, the cow, the dog, and the Apple II team were simple piles of broken, bloody bones.

In light of the events that night, Jobs had no other choice to commemorate the tragic events that had unfurled and therefore made Apple's development mascot the dogcow, Clarus, a merging of the two animals' names, Clara and Cletus.

And that, for those who didn't know, is the origin of Clarus the dogcow. Every time you click on a Mac OS Easter-egg that utters moof, you can look back to the terrible events that August, 1984 night at the Apple beach party that brought you the Clarus, the Apple dogcow."

Mr. Holdstein at WWDC 2010

Andy tell us a (very) different story about the origin of Clarus, the Dogcow.
Here Clarus is the niece of Mr. Holdstein (a cow figure).

Andy wrote this story to illustrate his serie of picture with Mr. Holdstein and Angy (on right, Angy at WWDC 2010).

"Mr. Holstein isn't a MacOS or iOS developer. He comes to WWDC at the invitation of his niece, Clarus. She works for Apple and has been a major figure in their developer community for years and years.

The two have a pretty close bond. Back in the 80's it was a pretty big taboo for a cow to date a dog, so when Mr. H's brother started dating Mabel, it didn't matter that she was a Dalmatian and could almost even "pass"...it caused a bit of a rift. Mr. H was the only one among his siblings who truly welcomed Clarus' mom into the family.

Which isn't to say that he himself didn't have some doubts, early on. Still, he came out for a "meet the family" dinner at Applebees. It was immediately clear to him right then and there that the two were in love. Yes, the couple would face many challenges from a narrow-minded Society, but in the end, love is all that really matters. Mr. H enjoys joking that Mabel is "obviously one of those exotic 'show' breeds of cow."

Mr. H's sisters could never get past their prejudices, and have mostly cut Clarus and her parents off. Oh, well. It's their loss. What a shame, to never know such a fine young woman as Clarus the Dogcow."

Clarus, the Dogcow Museum, maintained by PAD - 1997 - 2017
Most materials (pictures, icons, movies or sounds) are copyright by their original authors - Dogcow logo and Moof! are perhaps trademark by Apple Computer Inc.